US Immigration 1880–1920

The dedication of the Statue of Liberty in 1886 with its inscription exhorting the world to “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses” coincided with the first organized attempts to restrict or exclude those “huddled masses” from entering the United States. The Chinese Exclusion Act was promulgated in 1882, the Ellis Island Immigration Station (designed to vet and control entry through New York) opened in 1892, while the Immigration Restriction League, dedicated to preventing “Anglo-Saxon traditions … being drowned in a flood of racially inferior foreigners”, was founded by upper-class Bostonians in 1893 and soon had branches nationwide. The League’s crowning achievement was the Immigration Act of 1917 which imposed nationality quotas (particularly of Asians) on new arrivals. In practice, the “masses” tended to remain highly differentiated, partly for mutual support, partly to insulate themselves from the sort of prejudice evinced by the League. “Little Italies” sprang up in most Northeastern cities, “Little Canadas” in the northern Midwest, and Chinatowns in urban California. Given the limited means of most immigrants, there was also a pronounced tendency to cluster near points of arrival, with Latin Americans concentrated near the Southwestern border, Europeans in the Northeast (barring Scandinavians and Germans who gravitated to farming opportunities in the Midwest) and Asians to the West coast.